29 October 2010

Basically, Monsters is a remake of It Happened One Night—if instead of Depression-era America Clark Gable had had to traverse King Kong's Skull Island. And Frank Capra had been a moron. Like Gable, Scoot McNairy plays a journalist escorting a wealthy brat (Whitney Able) with an overbearing father across the country. Except here, that country is Mexico, and it's been infested with killer aliens.

Yes, the border region between the U.S. and its southern neighbor has become the "infected zone," overrun with cephalopod-like creatures after a UFO crash-landed, contaminating the landscape with, literally, "bad seeds". It's an almost-irresistible gimmick: an ambling, opposites-attract romance set against a science-fiction backdrop—Before Sunrise confined within the electric fences of Jurassic Park. But...

The intoxicated, sexually anxious, almost speechless Amer is pure atmosphere: it rips fear and desire from a narrative context, dropping them instead within the abstraction of hyper-subjectivity. Here, the strange twangs of comb-teeth impart more information—emotional information—than could any line of dialogue. The movie's all slow pans across peculiar tableaux, zooms, close-ups of eyes. It's horror cinema unadulterated, exorcised of meaning and imbued with pure feeling...Aggressively obscure, Amer is dreamy in the purest sense, restoring to cinema a shocking subjectivity it usually lacks: without the comfort of establishing shots or contextualizing dialogue, the movie willfully denies any narrative to form; it plays out as a series of close-ups, with shots laid like the panels of a textless comic book.

Psycho II may be smothered by its more-classic-than-classic predecessor, but that’s almost an advantage: one of the movie’s chief pleasures is that, with the old sets-and-stars on display in brazen Technicolor, watching it feels like crawling into an old favorite and poking around. Perkins reprises his role as Bates, released from the nuthouse to the consternation of Vera Miles, still playing victim-kin. She repudiates rehabilitation and spends the film conspiring to re-derange the motelier, inundating him with messages from his “mother”. Oh, but there’s a twist; Psycho II fashions a knotty mystery, but also an engaging social critique about how unforgiving conservatives are themselves the real psychos. And, how America creates its own enemies.

It’s the best-scripted sequel, but its follow-up proves the most ably directed...

22 October 2010

At the climax of Kuroneko (Black Cat), a dreamy Nihonese ghostie from 1968 in revival at Film Forum, a samurai thrusts his sword at an evil female feline-god who wants him to return her severed arm. She’s also a demivampire, and the warrior’s mom—at least, she used to be. This wacky-transcending movie is like the I Spit on Your Grave of rural Japanese peasantry, with an added anti-war angle. When it opens, a mother and daughter are robbed, raped and murdered by feral marauders—hungry, idle soldiers who then torch the house and burn the bodies. This, Shindo stresses with nonchalant silences, is the simple, horrible reality of life during wartime.

12 October 2010

Joe Dante’s The Hole is a throwback to the 1980s, the heyday of Spielburgian, scary-fun horror, when kids played the heroes and men like Dante owned the genre. One of the earliest images in this movie is of a station wagon pulling into Anytown, U.S.A.—after the camera has been spit out of the tail pipe—and, really, when’s the last time you actually saw anyone driving one of those? In the car are Chris Massoglia (teenager) and Nathan Gamble (pre-teen), playing brothers; behind the steering wheel is their single mom. They’ve fled Brooklyn for Bensonville, moving into a new house with a padlocked-shut hatch in the basement. The kids pry off the locks, of course, and find a mysterious abyss, a hole without a bottom that’s home to fear itself: it (somehow) discovers what gives you the creeps and unleashes it upon you.

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2010 New York Film Festival at The L Magazine

08 October 2010

Eastwood’s latest, an exercise in jet-setting thanatology, is as mammoth in scope as Mammoth, as high-minded as Babel, as wrecked as Crash. It’s a globally conscious film about death and the lives left behind—whether it’s white people in America, white people in England or white people in France, everyone is touched by death, struggling to cope with Loss and all it entails. The movie opens somewhere near the Indian Ocean, presumably, as it’s only a few minutes past the gray-tone Warner Brothers logo—gray is the color of ghosts!—when we’re already underwater, the latest victims of the 2004 tsunami and all the mawkish exploitation that comes with it. Before the movie ends, we will have lived through the 7/7 terror attacks on the London subway, as well—after all, how could you make a 21st Century movie obsessed with Death and not include a few of its greatest hits?

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2010 New York Film Festival at The L Magazine

After a recent screening of the I Spit on Your Graveremake, co-hosted by The L, half the audience stuck around for a screening of the 1976 original—and did a terrible MST3K impression throughout. They laughed at the rape victim’s hairy pubis when the assailants stripped off her clothes. They laughed all through the rape sequence, in fact—at the rapists’ funny faces, at the manner in which they raped her, at the speed with which they climaxed. A woman behind me repeatedly exclaimed disbelief that the woman being raped had “no ass”.

I have written before about the way that we, as a culture, turn objects of horror into those of humor as a means of conquering our fears, which was clearly what this crowd was doing. Even so, it was deeply disturbing, like watching the movie along with the rapists, drawing an explicit culpability connection between spectator and on-screen miscreant.

Ever the zeitgeist-engagers, director Reichardt and her frequent collaborator, screenwriter Jon Raymond, have made movies about the culture wars (2006’s Old Joy) and the new recession (2008’s Wendy and Lucy). So it’s no surprise that their latest, Meek’s Cutoff, tackles so many contemporary topics—fear of the Other, disillusionment with cowboy leadership, the allure of the mob—even though it’s set so far in the past.

Cutoff plays out in Oregon, 1845; a three-family group of deracinated, industrious would-be settlers (with overtaxed oxen and melancholic mules) has gone off The Trail, attempting to take a shortcut suggested by their hired guide, the hirsute Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood), but now hopelessly lost—and dangerously low on water. Despite having wandered off trail, the movie still often recalls the Oregon Trail video game. Welcome to scenes from the hardscrabble frontier: fording a river in silence, slow wanderings through desert-like landscapes (also in silence) that start to evoke Gerry...

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2010 New York Film Festival at The L Magazine

06 October 2010

It’s Kind of a Funny Story, based on Ned Vizzini’s YA novel, is Fleck and Boden’s Cyrus: a thoroughly mainstream comedy adorned with the indie trappings that gave the directors their name. The Brooklyn-based couple used to thrive off of subverting clichés. In their debut, Half Nelson, ostensibly an inner-city school movie, a white teacher is addicted to crack, and depends upon one his black students to pull him through it. In their follow-up, Sugar, they turned a baseball story into an immigrant story, transforming a film about the country’s old pastime into a story about the New America. With this, their latest, they have made a coming-of-age, sometimes-romantic comedy set in a psychiatric hospital. Period.

It’s Kind of a Funny Story is packed full of clichés, taken from Cuckoo’s Nest through the weekend’s latest generic rom-com. Keir Gilchrist stars as a shallowly depressed teen, off his meds and possibly suicidal, who checks himself into a mental ward and realizes he’s in over his head. While he suffers from the ordinary pressures of adolescence—awkwardness, loneliness, the competitiveness of exclusive schools—he’s now locked in with bona fide schizos and other real deal lunatics, including one played by Zach Galifanakis, whose impeccable ability to take subdued offense over minor slights supplies much of the film’s arid wit. But for every one of the movie’s lovingly crafted detail (like the scenes intermittently interrupted by screaming schizos) there’s another eye-rolling one, like the in-patient love interest in the Stooges tee, name-dropping Salvador Allende. Don’t get me started on the glam-rock fantasy sequence, lip-synched to (groan) Queen’s “Under Pressure”.

Fleck and Boden supply a few likably nativist touches for textural color: the rapid mini-portraits of real-life students at Executive Pre-Professional, reminiscent of Half Nelson’s student interviews; the detour to Williamsburg’s Hasidic acid scene; and, my favorite, the Super 8 tour of Brooklyn’s Western corridor, from Coney Island to Brooklyn Heights, Bay Ridge to the Brooklyn Bridge. But then there’s the way they expose the habits of the city’s wealthy classes—how they invent problems to supply their insignificant-seeming lives with the appearance of meaning—only to validate them, ultimately. During his five-day stint in a wellness program—the script pokes fun at the idea that one could get well in five days, but buys into it just the same—Gilchrist learns to, like, appreciate life, and stuff: that he should live freely, in a way that costs a lot of money. (Make art and travel!) Gee, wouldn’t that be nice? What a bunch of brats; Fleck and Boden should know better. Grade: C+

Last year’s outrages are already quaint. Back then, in The Last House on the Leftremake, a revolting rape scene carried on several sickening and unnecessary seconds too long. But in this year’s I Spit on Your Grave remake—a cabin-in-the-woods horror movie in which the monsters are not supernatural but mere men—a similarly gratuitous rape scene continues across several settings, from the cabin to the woods to the cabin to the woods. The woman is beaten and raped and raped and raped and stripped and shot, and this is after she has already been weirdly humiliated at length: made to feign oral sex on a bottle neck and a gun barrel; to show her teeth; to whinny like the showhorse her attackers keep calling her. The ordeal lasts from night into morning, and takes up an entire act of the film.

01 October 2010

Could this movie be any more Romanian? It’s been five years since director Puiu’s festival-circuit favorite The Death of Mr. Lazarescu heralded a new movement in film, and in that time what may have once constituted personal aesthetic preferences have become a national cinema’s lingua franca. Aurora employs all of the RomanianNewWave’s familiar motifs: watch an unshaved protagonist navigate dilapidated lodgings and industrial ruins lit with a sickly green glow; watch long stretches of silent surveillance, three hours of filmmaking without close-ups, without edited sequences of shots, steeped in morose silence. See an irascible population that takes out its bitterness on children; see moments of black humor, like the inherent absurdity of carrying a shotgun in one hand and a slice of chocolate cake in the other; see a lead actor whose inscrutably stoic mien betrays unhappiness but little else.

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2010 New York Film Festival at The L Magazine